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A Framework for Programming a Swarm of UAVs

Published: 26 June 2018 Publication History

Abstract

In recent years, sensing systems in urban environments are being replaced by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). UAVs, also known as drones, have shown great potential in executing different kinds of sensing missions, such as search and rescue, object tracking, inspection, etc. The UAVs' sensing capabilities and their agile mobility can replace existing complex solutions for such missions. However, coordinating a swarm of drones for mission accomplishment is not a trivial task. Existing works in the literature focus solely on managing the swarm and do not provide options for automating entire missions. In this paper, we present PaROS (PROgramming Swarm), a novel framework for programming a swarm of UAVs. PaROS provides a set of programming primitives for orchestrating a swarm of drones along with automating certain types of missions. These primitives, referred as abstract swarms, control every drone in the swarm, hiding the complexity of low level details from a programmer such as assigning flight plans, task partitioning, failure recovery and area division. Our experimental evaluation proves that our approach is stable, time-efficient and practical.

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  • (2024)Application Scenario Modeling and Verification for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Swarm2024 IEEE 24th International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS)10.1109/QRS62785.2024.00043(364-375)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2024)An Approach for Extended Swarm Formation Flight with Drones: $$\texttt {PROTEASE}^{2.0}$$Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Rigorous Engineering of Collective Adaptive Systems10.1007/978-3-031-75107-3_16(263-280)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
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cover image ACM Other conferences
PETRA '18: Proceedings of the 11th PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments Conference
June 2018
591 pages
ISBN:9781450363907
DOI:10.1145/3197768
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • NSF: National Science Foundation

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 26 June 2018

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Author Tags

  1. Framework
  2. Programming
  3. Swarm of Drones

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Cited By

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  • (2025)MacroSwarmScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2024.103182239:COnline publication date: 1-Jan-2025
  • (2024)Application Scenario Modeling and Verification for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Swarm2024 IEEE 24th International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS)10.1109/QRS62785.2024.00043(364-375)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2024)An Approach for Extended Swarm Formation Flight with Drones: $$\texttt {PROTEASE}^{2.0}$$Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Rigorous Engineering of Collective Adaptive Systems10.1007/978-3-031-75107-3_16(263-280)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
  • (2024)ScaFi-Blocks: A Visual Aggregate Programming Environment for Low-Code Swarm DesignCoordination Models and Languages10.1007/978-3-031-62697-5_14(258-276)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
  • (2023)Macroprogramming: Concepts, State of the Art, and Opportunities of Macroscopic Behaviour ModellingACM Computing Surveys10.1145/357935355:13s(1-37)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2023
  • (2023)MacroSwarm: A Field-Based Compositional Framework for Swarm ProgrammingCoordination Models and Languages10.1007/978-3-031-35361-1_2(31-51)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2023
  • (2021)Mission Specification and Execution of Multidrone Systems2021 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE)10.23919/DATE51398.2021.9474207(451-456)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2021
  • (2021)SkyQuery: an aerial drone video sensing platformProceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/3486607.3486750(56-67)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2021
  • (2020)Swarm and Collective Capabilities for Multipotent Robot EnsemblesLeveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation: Engineering Principles10.1007/978-3-030-61470-6_31(525-540)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2020
  • (2020)Maple-Swarm: Programming Collective Behavior for Ensembles by Extending HTN-PlanningLeveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation: Engineering Principles10.1007/978-3-030-61470-6_30(507-524)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2020
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